


Tall, Dark, and Ratsome

by spider_fingers



Series: a domestic zombie apocalypse (or, Let Them Be) [1]
Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Human!Outsider, Zombie Apocalypse, eating rats ain't a pleasant business, sickness & isolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 21:40:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17609492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spider_fingers/pseuds/spider_fingers
Summary: The stranger turns, crouching like he's looking for something in the water, and stops, legs half-bent, backpack hanging off his arm. There are large black glasses obscuring his face (aviators, a part of Corvo supplies), but he's looking this way.For a moment neither of them move. Then – slowly, very slowly – the stranger raises a hand to his face, and slides the aviators down. His eyes are also very pale.“Hello there,” he says, carefully folding the aviators and tucking them into the collar of his shirt. “I didn't expect to find anyone here.”





	Tall, Dark, and Ratsome

**Author's Note:**

> this is going to be a series of fics, each of them mostly centered on a trope i want to play around with; the zombie apocalypse is more an excuse to have these characters isolated in a weird commune-type apartment building than a part of the plot :P
> 
> (the idea started with an off-hand comment i made to puppyblue on her delicious fic **[Some Things You Let Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12978030)** , and here we are most of a year later)

Corvo crouches just inside the mouth of the overflow pipe and turns his face into the breeze coming off the Wrenhaven. Sunlight slants in, hot on the tops of his feet; he dares to stretch both arms out into it.

It's been a while since he's had a noseful of that salt-and-seaweed smell. It's been even longer since he's been this warm, like it might reach his damp bones. His fingers twitch, hands curling in despite themselves. He knows it's dangerous. He knows he should retreat, and count himself lucky nothing's seen or smelled him yet.

Pebbles tumble down from somewhere above the pipe. Corvo watches them clip quiet into the river, and sink.

He should go. He should leave, now; climb into one of the passages he knows so well and escape.

He doesn't move. Inside his chest, his heart is starting to beat like fists against a locked door.

There is the sound of shuffling. More pebbles rain down into the water. Then a foot, dangling from the top of the pipe. Then two. A body drops into the shallow end of the river, and rises.

Its skin is pale, but not corpse-pale. It straightens. The look it casts around is sharp and alert. Not a biter, then. This is– This is a man. Corvo swallows, and part of the tension turning him to rock drains like stormwater from a street. (The disappointment that remains – he's not sure what to do with that.)

The stranger turns, crouching like he's looking for something in the water, and stops, legs half-bent, backpack hanging off his arm. There are large black glasses obscuring his face (aviators, a part of Corvo supplies), but he's looking this way.

For a moment neither of them move. Then – slowly, very slowly – the stranger raises a hand to his face, and slides the aviators down. His eyes are also very pale.

“Hello there,” he says, carefully folding the aviators and tucking them into the collar of his shirt. “I didn't expect to find anyone here.”

Corvo watches and doesn't come any closer, but doesn't retreat either as the stranger rummages in the drifting algae at the edge of the water – only twitches when he surfaces with something clutched in his hand. “Ah – thought so,” he mutters, tucking it into the pouch strapped to his waist, and looks back up to Corvo. “I have a camp about thirty minutes away.” He stands, and takes a first careful step into the mouth of the pipe. “You can –”

Corvo darts away as fast as the water and slippery terrain allow; within seconds he's scrambled up into an offshoot, a lone startled rat skittering off ahead. He stops there, in the narrow dark, and waits.

There is silence at first, but before long the stranger's voice returns.

“No? Mm.” Then splashing, and more silence.

He's gone when Corvo leans out a while later. The sunlight is no longer at the right angle to reach the inside of the pipe. Corvo edges further into the offshoot, back to the familiar maze of the sewers.

The ocean-water smell fades much too fast, stamped out by mildew and rot. He misses it already.

 

***

 

The rats travel in swarms, sometimes. They're the ones he needs to be careful for: bigger, meaner, they'll eat him alive if they catch him – but all he needs is the high ground, a loosened piece of rebar, and good aim to spear himself dinner.

The rats writhe on the metal long after he stabs them. They're like the biters that way, though they always go still at some point.

He's about to skewer another when a long, echoing noise makes them scatter in search of easier prey. Frowning, Corvo sits up to try and pinpoint the source. It's not coming from this tunnel – the rats won't catch whatever it is – but from somewhere behind him. It sounds like... sounds like something treading water. Dread in his stomach, he stashes the skewer somewhere safe and out of reach and goes looking.

The closer he gets, the louder the sound of splashing is. Whatever it is isn't even trying to be discreet. Corvo hefts a chunk of rock in one hand as he passes one of the collapsed tunnels and continues, cautious.

He catches sight of it when he comes to the main drain, the one that winds deep into the guts of the city: it's the stranger. From his perch inside a pipe high in the wall, Corvo can see the pack riding high on his back, and the aviators, dangling from his neckline. The stranger is tall enough that even wading near the middle of the drain, the water only comes up to his hips.

It's terribly stupid to walk upcurrent like this. The rats know how to swim.

Corvo looks to the rock he's holding. Weighs it in his hand.

It makes an unbelievable racket, striking against the wall beneath him; the stranger whirls around with a sharp intake of breath, one hand going for his belt, and sights him, and goes still.

“There you are,” he says. His mouth does something strange – a smile. Corvo shuffles in place until he can sit at the end of the pipe, legs hanging down. The stranger crosses his arms, his mouth still smiling. “I brought you something. Come down and see.” He starts wading back the way he came, keeping to the shallow side this time. When the stranger turns the corner, out of sight, Corvo slides from the pipe and lands, almost quiet, in the drainwater. He follows.

The stranger has set up on the bank right by the mouth of the drain: a burner, a cloth sheet on the ground, a couple of tin cans. ( _It's a picnic,_ says that quiet little part of him.) The stranger is already sitting down, hacking open one of the cans with a knife, a pot of scummy water set to heat. Corvo comes to the very limit of the drain, and goes no further.

Once both cans are open and dropped in the simmering water, the stranger looks at him again. “You don't want to sit down?”

Corvo crouches in the shallows at the edge of the drain. He doesn't mind the wet; the damp is never far, anyway. The stranger lifts a hand and rubs his nose. Corvo can't see his mouth, but that part of him that's been starting to stir again thinks he's amused. “Alright,” the stranger says, and goes back to poking at the contents of the cans.

The stranger is tall, and not so much thin as stretched out – like his bones are too long, or like he'd been normal-sized and someone had picked him up and pulled on both ends. His hair is black, stringy, plastered to the top of his head like it's wet. Corvo shifts. His legs are getting tired.

The stranger takes a rag to pick one of the cans out of the pot, and carries it over to Corvo; offers it, a fork in his other hand. The smell is unbearable. Corvo's mouth waters.

“That's the face of a man who's eaten nothing but rats for days,” says the stranger, and Corvo, halfway to reaching out, squints at him suspiciously. The stranger observes him back. “I haven't been watching you,” he says, more fact than reassurance, like part of what he means to say is, _I could have, but opted not to._ “In fact, I didn't see you for so long I thought you might have died. It's just a very distinctive face.”

Corvo looks to the can instead, the one now in his hands, open, tempting. What's inside is... disturbing. Red. Wet and glistening. There are – lumps? pale and yellowish, suspended in the mess. Nothing like the structure of meat attached to tendon attached to bone. More like pulp. Corvo takes a long hard look at it, the fork suspended.

The smell –

“It's ravioli,” the stranger says after maybe a minute. He's forking up lumps from his own can, nibbling all along the edges before chomping through the middle. Corvo stares at the stuff a moment longer while the stranger chews consideringly. “Meat, dough, tomatoes and herbs?” the stranger continues, as though the problem is Corvo not knowing what ravioli is.

Corvo grunts, and the stranger smiles again, but smaller, deeper. “So he speaks.”

Corvo scoops up one of the ravioli and tests the corner with the very ends of his front teeth.

It tastes – good. ( _Rich,_ the quiet part of him offers.) He makes his way through a third of the can, slowly. The stranger looks to have finished most of his. Corvo holds out the rest.

“You can keep it,” the stranger says, scraping what's left of his into a bag. Small, transparent – ziploc. “Here.” The stranger hands him the bag, too; mimes what he just did when Corvo doesn't move, bag in one hand and can in the other. Corvo frowns, but does the same. It's a lot of food. Might even feed him for two days. He'll eat it cold – save on supplies.

The stranger packs up, and stands there looking at him.

“I have a camp,” he says. “About an hour away.”

Corvo takes a slow step back, and crouches again in the water. His heartbeat fills his skull, pounds it hollow, leaves his limbs tingling and frozen.

The stranger's head tilts, but he nods. Corvo watches him leave.

 

***

 

Rats are hard to skin, especially when they're still squirming. He's just so hungry.

He tried to make the stranger's food last, but he can't do without boiling the water, and there isn't much fuel left. He's been eating everything raw instead. Moss. Bulrushes. Algae.

He feels so empty, and still it's taken him this long to come to rats.

Flesh is harder to hack through uncooked. His hands shake, a little. The knife skids and slides when he tries, so he resorts to teeth, and gnawing.

The meat sings in his mouth.

A while passes before he surfaces enough to notice the noise – almost familiar now, an unwary splashing that echoes up and down the passages. He stumbles to his feet and follows it, hasty; almost slips a few times on the way, guiding himself (steadying himself) with a hand pressed to the curve of a pipe, or the hard grit of a wall. It's stopped by the time he comes out into the main drain.

On the shore just beyond the mouth, left on a low pile of stones to keep it from the wet, is a package. The stranger is nowhere to be seen.

Corvo stands at the edge of the drain, sweating, heart ramming at his ribs, long enough that the sun only just clears the buildings on the opposite shore before darting out on land (sand and rocks under his feet shifting sliding and the sound they make and it digs in the raw soles of his feet and the air so much air the river is breathing) and grabbing the package and retreating, crouched in the shallow water of the pipe. He breathes and trembles, then steadies. The package is in his lap, still dry. He opens it.

The wrapping is a thick piece of cloth, the fibers stiff and discolored. Corvo presses it to his face. It's coarse – moreso than rat fur, even on the uneven hair covering him from jaw to chin. He buries his nose in it.

Dirt, dust. Under that, a sense-memory of green, cool and ticklish. He doesn't know whether the vague impression of warmth is left over from the time spent in the sun, or if that's his own breath blowing back at him.

The rest of the package is two bottles of pills and a slip of paper. He has to stare at it for a long moment before the ink starts to make any sense.

_Sorry I couldn't stay. With winter coming I thought the blanket would be useful._

_Take one of each vitamin a day._

That must be what's in the bottles. He raises them to his face, to try and read the small script on the side, but the light's getting too low to see much more than the idea of text. He packs everything back up, hefts it over his shoulder, and makes his way back to his bolthole.

 

***

 

It's been a month. He doesn't think the stranger is coming back.

A week ago he tried drinking unboiled water. It made him sick – the kind of sick he couldn't remember having been in a long time, or ever. He might have passed out at some point, he doesn't remember, but when he woke up he spent hours doing nothing but boiling water and drinking it, still warm, doing his best not to spill it with his hands (his arms, his chest, his entire body) shaking as they were.

Once he'd slept, he skewered one of the rats he'd saved and roasted it whole over the burner. Cooked meat was sweeter than he remembered. He ate it slow, down to the bones, the fat and gristle too. Popped the vitamins. Slept again.

He only puked a little during the night. After that, smooth sailing. (Mostly. The cold sinks down into him further than it has ever reached. His stomach is tight, his vision troubled. His muscles started aching one day and never stopped.)

Yesterday the fuel ran out.

He's sitting on the riverbank by the mouth of the drain, huddled in the blanket. At first his heart pounded against his headache, driving long teeth into the back of his head, but now it's settled in his chest like an animal with low, rattling breaths. He breathes, too – shallow enough not to feel how dry his mouth is, his tongue sticking to the roof of it.

(He went in search of rats after waking, speared the first he could find, and ate it there, crouched in the pipe, its corpse-fat body ripe with blood. He wiped it off his chin, sucked it from his fingers. Not enough.)

The sun is barely rising. The stranger was right: they're at the cusp of winter.

He has no fuel left, and with the cold coming on he can't stay in the dark and damp. He has to go elsewhere. Find some other place.

He sits, and watches the sun move.

Pebbles skitter down, some scattering on the shore, some disappearing into the water with small sharp sounds. Maybe it's a biter. He hasn't seen one wander into the sewers to be eaten by rats in a while. His heart is soft and quiet behind his ribs.

“... still don't know why you wanted me to come with –”

“In case I need another pair of arms, I told you.”

Voices. People. Not biters?

“What does that _mean_ –”

They were coming closer, but now they've stopped.

“Is that – Is that a dog?” Another pause. “Did you drag me here... to bring back a _dog._ ”

“I didn't drag you anywhere. Your feet carried you here, didn't they?”

That voice – sounds familiar. Corvo tries to unwrap the blanket from around him and can only twitch, stiff as a lock rusted shut. It hurts to unfold his arms, but he manages, and turns his head to look.

It's the stranger – his face, his hair, though the aviators are gone. Next to him another unknown stands. This man's face is darker, the mouth a hard line.

“That's human,” he says, and when the stranger makes to take another step forward the unknown man whips out a hand and stops him short, grip twisting the fabric of the stranger's jacket. “What are you doing?”

“He isn't dangerous,” the stranger says, not even looking at his companion.

“It's not talking.”

“He never does.” The stranger jerks out of the other man's hold and makes his way down to the shore. The other man follows. His eyes track Corvo's every move.

The stranger crouches in front of Corvo, eyes flicking over what he can see between the hair and the mass of blanket. “You don't look well.”

There is a noise like rough hinges grinding, and Corvo huffs, voice soundless and dry. His stomach made the point for him. The stranger swings his backpack onto the rocks, delves into it and comes back up with a pear, small and spotted. “Here. Can you walk?”

The other man is pacing along the shore, ten meters on and back, shoulders hiked up, and at the question he moves his neck like he wants to say something but won't. Corvo reaches for the pear – he feels like something creaking and badly maintained, all the way through – and stands, still draped in the blanket. The stranger watches him rise.

“I have a camp,” he says as Corvo bites into the pear, licking up as much of the juice as he can get. “It's half an hour away.”

Corvo swallows and his breath whistles, a little, and he keeps eating, but his eyes meet the stranger's and he doesn't back away. That's as good as an answer.

The stranger hefts the bag back up on his shoulders. “Okay.”

A little further along the shore, the other man grunts and mutters, “Fuck's sake,” and comes back in great strides to zip open the backpack's front pocket. “Give the man some water. He's like a prune.” The flask he draws out smacks the stranger in the chest.

The stranger frowns, purses his lips, and hands the flask over.

Corvo drinks half of it in one go and hunches after, trying not to vomit. The water is clear, cold. It washes him clean. It's the best thing he's ever tasted.

 

The trip to their camp takes until the sun is almost down, which Corvo thinks is more than half an hour's time. He doesn't walk as fast as they do; or at least, as fast as the stranger does, long legs carrying him far forward, far enough he sometimes turns and waits or trots back to where Corvo trudges steadily on. The other man keeps pace with Corvo, always three or four meters ahead; the blanket, rolled as best they could, is thrown over his shoulder. The stranger had looked at Corvo's shirt after he'd come out from under the blanket and given him his raincoat instead.

The soles of his feet start to hurt. He's not used to walking this long on dry ground.

No sound, no movement, but the other two are nervous, always scanning the street, the alleys. The second man especially.

“We saw no walkers coming here,” the stranger said once, slowing to inspect the next street before turning into it.

“Walkers walk,” the other man shot back, and they were quiet after that.

There's no trouble, though. They reach their destination without once drawing the knives or guns Corvo has been eyeing at the backs of their belts.

Camp is a boarded-up breakroom at the back of a – a trashed coffee shop, he thinks, the torn boards still hanging over the counter somewhere close to familiar. The other man locks the door and secures it with an emptied vending machine. The stranger brings out what Corvo thinks is the same burner as before, and a pot, and water, and cans, and starts what must be dinner.

Corvo crouches in a corner with his back to the wall and finds his legs won't carry him anymore. He slides down, and pulls his knees up to his chest. His thighs and calves ache, a deep and searing burn. His head pounds at the edge of pain. Everything is heavy.

The stranger and the other man start a hushed discussion around the burner, and the stranger rises to his feet. When he comes up next to Corvo he tips part of a can's contents into the wide cap of the flask and hands it over. Corvo takes it, and stares.

“It's just beans,” says the stranger, quiet; brings out a plastic packet of – nuts, and maybe dried fruit. “And trail mix. Daud thinks you'll do better with this.”

Corvo takes the packet, eyes flicking over to where the other man is digging into his own can and back to the stranger, who blinks. His expression is wry with realization. “Yes. He's Daud. I'm Mark.”

“And sometimes he's Thomas,” Daud says from over by the burner, curled around his food. “Or Rinaldo. Or _Montgomery,_ ” which he says with a strange tone Corvo can't figure out. Daud's gaze switches focus to him. “You got a name?”

Corvo rolls the flask cap in his hands. Tips a third of the contents into his mouth. Stares back.

Daud's mouth twitches. “Still not talking.”

Mark makes a sharp sound, and Corvo almost startles to hear it right by him. “I did tell you.” Mark's eyes are fixed on a point a little above Corvo's face, his expression intense, brow furrowing. Corvo reaches up, touches his hair where it hangs stringy and lifeless, haphazardly raked away from his eyes.

On the other side of the room, Daud says, “Not enough time between here and home to fix him.”

“I don't need to fix anything,” Mark answers just short of snappish, but he's stopped glaring at Corvo's hair. He gathers up the empty cap and the rest of the beans, starts eating on the way back to the burner. Corvo huddles further into himself. The rough blanket he's slept the last month in is rolled up against the wall; he peeks at it from the corner of his eye, uncertain.

Some sense that he's being watched draws his gaze to the two by the burner. Daud, scraping up the last of his food, is looking back. Their eyes lock.

 _If you look away now,_ a small and stupid part of him whispers, and doesn't finish the thought – but it suddenly feels terribly important that he not look down. He thinks the spike of tension in his shoulders must be anticipation. Or challenge. His eyes are starting to sting.

He blinks.

(Corvo doesn't notice them ready their beds. He is already fast asleep.)

 

Corvo wakes as the others are breaking camp. The blanket is tucked around him. He doesn't remember retrieving it the night before, but it's satisfying to know it is still his.

He stuffs handfuls of trail mix into his mouth, chewing while they pack and shift into gear, and when they're ready he gets up to follow.

They lead him further into the city. Sometimes, they pass streets blocked side to side with cars, furniture, chain link fence, whatever might have been on hand. Usually they can hear the shuffling and loud, uncontrolled breathing of biters on the other side. They keep quiet; pass unnoticed.

Once, Mark turns back from inspecting a street with a washed-slate look on his face and says, “Walker, quick, inside,” and they dive into the nearest building with cover. They watch it pass. Wait for more. _There are always more,_ Corvo thinks, and it feels like it should be a memory.

This one is alone. Daud keeps looking at his wrist, at his watch, and after a time, says, “It's been fifteen minutes.” Mark goes first, sinks his knife into the biter's soft skull and drags it back out of sight. They wait again.

“Five minutes,” Daud says, and they keep going.

It takes a good part of the day, but finally Mark stops at the door to an apartment building, brings out a key and lets them inside. The first floor windows are boarded, everything dark and smelling of settled dust. Silent. Corvo knows, as soon as they walk in: there is no one here.

They lead him up, up, and up, to the roof, where the access door is held open by the length of metal cord secured to the stair railing and stretching all the way to the edge of the building. He touches the cord, light, as he follows them onward. They're high above a good part of the city, here: he can see rooftops all around, vents and cable antennae. The wind digs cold fingers under his coat.

“You see that short block, over there?” Mark says, and points. Corvo looks out over the side.

He sees it: small, green-roofed, right by a park. The streets around it are fortified.

“That's where we're going. By zip-line.”

Corvo's hand closes, tight – nervous – around the wire rope. He can follow the line of it stretching across the distance all the way to the squat building Mark had pointed out. Something is pushed into his other hand: a pulley. The other two each have one already.

“There's a mat, but be prepared for a rough landing,” Mark says, off-hand as he gets ready at the edge of the roof.

“Where's he going to sleep?” Daud asks, and eyes Corvo's grip on the rope critically.

“In your flat, of course,” Mark says – and grins, settling his pulley, as he whips down the line. Daud's mouth is hanging open.

His face shifts minutely for a moment, jaw and eyebrows working, and settles on something flat with a long, drawn-out sigh. He stashes his gun and knife in his own pack, undoes his belt, and hands it to Corvo.

“Did you watch closely?” he asks. Corvo nods. “Good. Buckle that under your arms and around the pulley. Didn't go to all this effort for you to fall off on the way.”

He goes.

Corvo waits for him to land, and follows.

 


End file.
